Photography—the art of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation—has been practiced for nearly two centuries. In the early practice of photography, light-sensitive materials, such as photographic films, were often employed to capture images via a chemical process. For example, a lens was used to focus the light reflected or emitted from an object into a real image on a light-sensitive surface inside a camera during a timed exposure. While such practices may still be employed, more recent advances have allowed images to be captured electronically through use of an image sensor. The result in an electronic image sensor is an electrical charge at each pixel, which is electronically processed and stored in a digital image file for subsequent display or processing.
One difference between digital and chemical photography is that chemical photography generally resists photo manipulation because it involves film and photographic paper, while digital imaging is a highly manipulative medium. This difference allows for a degree of image post-processing in digital photography that is comparatively difficult in film-based photography. However, while the advent of inexpensive digital image sensors and even the ability to create photographs that combine information from a number of sensed images have begun to change the way society thinks about photography, a need still exists for improved systems and methods for producing visual representations of objects.